Mick captures the Dunkirk spirit
This week, as the 70th anniversary of the rescue of allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk is commemorated, we spoke to award winning author/ illustrator and 175 Hero, Mick Manning about his latest book, My Uncle’s Dunkirk. The book derives from Mick’s inheritance of some wartime artefacts preserved but unspoken about by his Uncle Gil, and Mick and his wife, Brita Granström, have used their unique gifts to create a book that speaks to children of our shared cultural legacy.
Mick explained, “My Uncle was from Lewisham and that's where he joined up as a royal artillery engineer in 1937 and found himself on the beaches of Dunkirk three years later.
After the war he never talked about it, not even to his wife. He lived by the seaside all his working life, where he was a telephone engineer. In the 1960's when I was a boy, we would go every summer for holidays. They were happy times. On one visit, when I was about eight, I found a box of World War Two history magazines in their spare room where I slept. I read these, finding out for myself about Dunkirk and the tragedy my uncle had survived.When my uncle died in the 1990's my auntie found a plastic bag of ephemera in his tool shed: his army pay book, some cigarette picture cards, tickets and telegrams; and she gave them to me.He'd never said anything about his war experiences other than he had been at Dunkirk, even to her – yet he had kept this packet of assorted wartime ephemera safe for 50 years.
I wanted to make a book about him, the seductive ephemera of old cig cards and paybooks - and most of all his reluctance to talk about what he had been through; a quiet reflective book that would contrast with the chatty RAF war memories of my father in Tail-End Charlie.
The beaches where I built sandcastles and the French beaches where my uncle waited for rescue became part of the same story, a story I have called My Uncle's Dunkirk. The images flip between holiday beach scenes and Dunkirk which reinforces the contrast between war and peace and past and present (well the 1940s and the 1960s). This gives a child a safe place on 
every other page and a war experience alternately, so they can turn from safety to distress when they feel ready, and retreat to the beach holiday if it gets too tough.
every other page and a war experience alternately, so they can turn from safety to distress when they feel ready, and retreat to the beach holiday if it gets too tough.Mick and Brita staged a live audio visual performance at The Spoken Word Festival at the Maltings Theatre in Berwick upon Tweed on 1st May and will be appearing at the Imperial War Museum on 31st May and 1st June. Futher dates will be announced soon.
The book is on sale in book stores and online.
